I had found Astra on Facebook a month earlier, and we had written back and forth trying to arrange a time to meet. I knew that she had been a barmaid back when that was still the term, in a pub off Punt Road, in the late 1960s. Denis had told me that. I knew that she had been a tarot reader and a student counsellor, because my father had said so, and that she was an Integrated Clinical Hypnotherapist now — I’d seen her website — and a member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts. From Facebook I knew that she had signed petitions against the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and had attended, or at least planned to attend, a number of rallies for climate justice and marriage equality in the last year. I’d seen her holiday photos from Japan and knew that she had donated to a fund to help rebuild a Buddhist shrine that had been damaged by the tsunami in 2011. I knew that she grew her own vegetables, and made kombucha and bread and jewellery. I knew (again from Facebook) that she had a partner called Tess, who was also a therapist of some sort, and that she had at least two grown children, a daughter called Indra, who was a yoga teacher in San Francisco (I’d seen Indra’s Instagram account), and a son called Rhett (Facebook), who was a connoisseur of extremely violent computer games and a supporter, it seemed, of Donald Trump. Astra must have been about sixty-four years old, I calculated, because she’d been thirteen in 1966, when three UFOs had come down and hovered above the sports oval, before lifting off again and disappearing into the area of woodland that lay behind her school. This was in the Melbourne suburb of Westall, near Clayton, where she had grown up. I remembered my father telling me this story in the backyard that night. I remembered the way his eyes grew watery, and his nostrils flared, as he tried to find the simple words to describe his affection for this woman. Words I had long forgotten, though I thought I could remember the look on his face: excited, credulous, idiotic. What am I supposed to do with this story? I remember thinking. But when I looked into it years later, as I was preparing to meet Astra, I found a documentary on YouTube about the incident. It was a real thing. There were more than two hundred witnesses.

‘Did you see it?’ I asked.

‘See what?’

‘The documentary?’

‘Oh,’ Astra said. ‘Is that what you’re here for?’ She leant back in her chair, assessing me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really. It was just something I remembered Dad mentioning. The UFOs, I mean.’